Quotes about belief
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“Religious = absolute belief without proof.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Friday

Source: Friday (1982), Chapter 18 (p. 181)

“It is the vaccine or vaccines that will win the war against COVID-19, not the government or mythological beliefs.”

P. Chidambaram (1945) Indian politician

Source: Jan 2021 https://twitter.com/PChidambaram_IN/status/1350733987640086530

War

“Prior to studies of unusually intelligent people that showed them to be generally much better adapted and happier than others, the popular belief in the United States was that exceptional intelligence was often associated with exceptional ability to “drive yourself nuts.””

Robyn Dawes (1936–2010) American psychologist

Hence, people believed that genius and lunacy were intimately connected. Perhaps, nearly all of us “drive ourselves a little nuts” by virtue of creating stories that lead us to the illusion that we understand history, other people, causality, and life—when we don’t.
Source: Everyday Irrationality: How Pseudo-Scientists, Lunatics, and the Rest of Us Systematically Fail to Think Rationally (2001), Chapter 7, “Good Stories” (p. 125)

People, Intelligence, Study

“[O]ne of the great things about science is it forces us to refine our idea of what's common sense. It forces us to have our beliefs conform to the evidence of reality rather than the other way around. The universe may not be like we'd like it to be, but it doesn't really care.”

Lawrence M. Krauss book A Universe from Nothing

"Lawrence Krauss: A Universe from Nothing" (2031) <br class="br">Source: 7:09 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46sKeycH3bE&t=429s

Way, Idea, Reality, Sense

“The time was, before this miserable rent in the Church of Christ—which I think no true Christian can look upon but with a bleeding heart—that you and we were all of one belief. That belief was tainted, in tract and corruption of times, very deeply.”

William Laud (1573–1645) Archbishop of Canterbury

Source: A Relation of the Conference betweene William Lawd...and Mr. Fisher the Jesuite (1639), quoted in The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, sometime Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Volume II: Conference with Fisher (1849), p. 141

Thinking, Time, Heart, Christ

“Scientists try to eliminate their false theories, they try to let them die in their stead. The believer—whether animal or man—perishes with his false beliefs.”

Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science

Source: Epistemology Without A Knowing Subject (1967)

Animals, Falseness

“When we jump to a conclusion before doing research, we tend to look for evidence that supports our beliefs and ignore facts that contradict them. This deprives us of the opportunity to grow our knowledge.”

Guy P. Harrison (1963) American skeptic author

Support, Knowledge

“It makes no difference to us what your religion is because we believe that as humanity we are all one. Thus, no matter what a person's belief we should love and respect each other.”

Mirza Masroor Ahmad (1950) spiritual leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community

Others

Love, Religion, Personality

“During the festival we appreciate how big is God´s gift to Asmat people. They can preserve their identity through their woodcarvings. Their carving is art that reflects fundamental beliefs passed down from generation to generation.”

Aloysius Murwito (1950) Indonesian catholic priest

Source: Church Continues To Preserve Asmat Culture Through Art Festival https://www.ucanews.com/story-archive/?post_name=/2006/10/30/church-continues-to-preserve-asmat-culture-through-art-festival&post_id=28455 (6 October 2006)

God, People, Art

“Everyone with different beliefs, with different backgrounds, with different cultures, they all come together and when you are in there (at the Miss Universe pageant), you forget about politics, about your religion. It's just about embracing other women.”

Andrea Meza (1994) Miss Universe 2020

Source: Andrea Meza (2021) cited in: " In Israel, Miss Universe says pageant no place for politics https://www.arabnews.com/node/1970011/offbeat" in Arab News, 17 November 2021.

Women, Religion, Universe, Forgetting

“Injustice ... regardless to whomever acted upon or performed against, is still injustice. The unjust person is never relieved of the responsibility of these acts under the pretext that the injustice is done against a heterodox and not to a believer. As our Lord Jesus Christ in the Gospels said do not oppress or accuse anyone falsely; do not make any distinction or give room to the believers to injure those of another belief.”

Metrophanes III of Constantinople (1520–1580) Patriarch of Constantinople

Statement condemning the mistreatment of Jews on the Island of Crete by Orthodox powers. <br class="br">Source: An Orthodox Christian View of Non-Christian Religions https://www.goarch.org/-/an-orthodox-christian-view-of-non-christian-religions by Rev. Dr. George C. Papademetriou; Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America

Christ, Personality, Falseness

“It seems to me that an age of belief sowed the good seed of which an age of unbelief, an age at least of less fervent belief, reaps the fruits. It strikes me that the moral precepts and moral influences of Christianity needed the dogmatic teaching and the systematic discipline of past times to gain for them a hold in the world. The sower may sometimes have sowed tares along with his wheat, but the wheat has survived the tares. I believe that many a man who has little faith in Christian theology is deeply influenced by Christian morality, and that he is altogether a different man from what he would have been had Christianity never been.”

Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–1892) English historian (1823-1892)

Source: 'The Morality of Field Sports', The Fortnightly Review (October 1869), quoted in E. A. Freeman, The Morality of Field Sports (1874), p. 12

Age, World, Faith, Time

“And, after all, the humane spirit, which is the motive power of all true schemes of reform, is, by its very essence, independent of belief in what is commonly called "success."”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

Source: " The Poet of Pessimism https://www.henrysalt.co.uk/library/essay/the-poet-of-pessimism/", Vegetarian Review, August 1896 <br class="br">Context: We work for an ideal, not because we believe the ideal is destined to be triumphant, but because we are impelled so to work, and cannot, without violence to our best instincts, act otherwise. We protest against cruelty and injustice for the same reason, not merely because we feel that the dawn of a better day is at hand, but because such a protest has to be made, and we know intuitively that we must help to make it. Of the event we can have no absolute assurance—it rests for other minds and other hands than our—but we can at least be assured that we have done what was natural and inevitable to us, and that, whether successful or unsuccessful, there was no other course for a thoughtful man to take.

Motivation, Success

“I can but repeat now the statement, even at the risk of shocking some readers, that the Puritans were beguiled into the worst of their errors of policy, bigotry, and intolerance, by their belief in and their attempt to follow the teacings which they found in the Bible.”

George Edward Ellis (1814–1894) American Unitarian clergyman and historian (1814-1894)

[The Puritan Age and Rule in the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1685, https://books.google.com/books?id=toM-AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA31, 31, 1888, Houghton, Mifflin, 978-0-7222-0646-1]

Error

“Despite common belief, the goblin language did include a word for trust. It was derived from the word for trustworthy, which in the goblin tongue, was the same as the word for dead.”

Jim C. Hines (1974) American writer

Source: The Goblin Quest Series, Goblin Hero (2007), Chapter 1 (pp. 19-20)

Dead

“The great disease of mankind is ignorance.
With knowledge you can grasp tight a belief: that you can be better, that the world can be better. With that, you can claim hope.
Hope is the eternal tool in the survival kit for mankind. We hope for a little luck, we hope for a better tomorrow, we hope — although it is an impossible hope — to somehow get out of this world alive.
And if we can't and don't, then it is enough to rejoice in our short time here and to remember how much we loved the view.”

Sidney Poitier (1927) American-born Bahamian actor, film director, author, and diplomat

Source: Life Beyond Measure (2008), twenty-third letter — The World I Leave You, p. 273

Love, World, Disease, Hope

“Religious faith and its practice cannot be taken for granted and we must be resolved in our defense of our cherished freedom to practice our faith, especially in the context of a secular culture which many times is opposed to its basic beliefs. History has witnessed many instances of blatant disregard for religious liberty which has resulted in devastating persecution.”

Gerald Barbarito (1950) Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Palm Beach, Florida

Source: This 'Fortnight for Freedom' https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/column/52207/this-fortnight-for-freedom (28 June 2012)

Faith, History, Freedom, Time

“The belief that we can maintain current levels of consumption, especially of animal products, capitalist expansion, imperial wars, a reliance on fossil fuels and abject subservience to unfettered corporate power, which has solidified the worst income inequality in human history, is not a form of hope but suicidal self-delusion. We are not headed under the policies of the Biden administration and the global ruling elite for the broad sunlit uplands of a new and glorious future, but economic misery, vast climate migrations, waves of new and more virulent pandemics, of which COVID-19 is a mild precursor, along with irreversible ecological systems collapse and frightening forms of societal breakdown, authoritarianism and neofascism.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

Source: The Great Delusion https://scheerpost.com/2020/12/21/chris-hedges-the-great-delusion/. Scheerpost, December 21, 2020

War, Hope, History, Suicide

“Even when I was a struggling actor, I was writing scripts, which were terrible, but I was fueled by a belief that I had to create the door. The right door wasn’t always going to open for me. Sometimes I was going to have to just crash through it or build one where there was no door before.”

Simu Liu (1989) Chinese-born Canadian actor

Source: "‘Shang-Chi’ Star Simu Liu on “Betrayal” of ‘Kim’s Convenience’ Cancellation" in The Hollywood Reporter (21 May 2021) https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/shang-chi-star-simu-liu-1234955154/

“The great driving force of the oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right.”

Jack London book The Iron Heel

Source: The Iron Heel (1907), Ch. XXI

“Very little is 100% true or 100% untrue – most beliefs exist on a spectrum of probability. Therefore, learning to think in terms of probabilities instead of absolutes may be one of the most effective upgrades to your thinking.”

Unknown author

Thinking, Learning

“Stoicism, in our day, is not strength to overcome wishes, but to hide them.…Tendencies have become endemic in our culture for our denial of wishes to be rationalized and accepted with the belief that this denial of the wish will result in its being fulfilled.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 10 : Intentionality in Therapy, p. 265

“Freedom of speech cannot be a reason to incite racial or cultural discrimination and tear society apart. We hope Sweden can earnestly respect the religious beliefs of minority groups, including Muslims.”

Wang Wenbin (1971) Chinese diplomat

Wang Wenbin (2022) cited in " Respect religious beliefs of Muslims, China tells Sweden https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220420-respect-religious-beliefs-of-muslims-china-tells-sweden/" on Middle East Monitor, 20 April 2022.

Hope, Tear, Freedom

“Ultimately, it's not about meditation or belief in some scripture or religion, it's about flowing with the river of life, it's about living with compassion and gratitude.”

Om Swami (1979) Indian mystic

A Million Thoughts (2016)

Life, Religion, Gratitude

“I must pronounce my firm belief that Tibet will soon regain her independence and that His Holiness the Dalai Lama will return to the Golden Throne. Long live His Holiness the Dalai Lama.”

Choekyi Gyaltsen (1938–1989) 10th Panchen Lama of the Gelug School of Tibetan Buddhism

As quoted in 1964, "Death of the Tenth Panchen Lama" https://www.shambhala.com/snowlion_articles/panchen-lama-death/

“Although we may be different in our look, ethnicity, culture, and clothing we are all the same and want the same – faith, hope and love. Our beliefs bind us so closely, that even though we come from various backgrounds we are able to live with each other in peace and harmony.”

Paul Hinder (1942) Roman Catholic bishop, Capuchin Friar

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Ahead of Being on Papal Flight for United Arab Emirates, ZENIT Speaks with Apostolic Vicar of Southern Arabia Bishop Paul Hinder https://zenit.org/2019/02/03/exclusive-interview-ahead-of-being-on-papal-flight-for-united-arab-emirates-zenit-speaks-with-apostolic-vicar-of-southern-arabia-bishop-paul-hinder-2/ (3 February 2019)

Love, Peace, Faith, Hope

“The monetary belief, or the monetary myth, upon which a whole generation has been reared—that an injection of money into the system is the automatic cure for unemployment—has collapsed in the face of the experience of the past four or five years.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1971/nov/23/unemployment-1#column_1202 in the House of Commons (23 November 1971) <br class="br">1970s

Money, Past